Smartphones are, on balance, good things. They let you place your coffee order before you arrive at the coffee shop. They let you post photos of your baby a few hours after she’s born, thus allowing friends and family members to coo over how cute she is much faster than the olden days. They allow you to check your bank account’s balance in the parking lot of the restaurant where you’re supposed to be having lunch with friends. With sites like Coupon To Pay, you can even see if there are any discounts that can save you money on that lunch.

Despite all the good, though, smartphones also let you do something else: drive yourself crazy.

There’s a phenomena that the kids call FOMO, which means Fear of Missing Out. With smartphones, there’s often a fear of missing out on some relevant bit of information, like wedding photos posted by your best friend, or news about the flooding in the Gulf Coast. In fact, diving into the news on your phone is a great way to rattle yourself. There are so many bad things happening all the time, and you feel obligated to care about each and every one of them in a different way. It’s emotionally and even physically exhausting, so you put down your phone and vow to go to sleep. Then you start wondering if your sister has replied to your email about Christmas plans yet, and so you pick up your phone again and the cycle repeats.

You don’t have to know and experience every single thing at once. In fact, it’s easy to get so caught up in documenting your birthday party on Instagram that you forget to actually talk to your guests and truly enjoy your party. You can take a great photo of your birthday cake with your smartphone’s camera, but the smartphone can’t blow out the candles and eat the corner piece. That’s your job.

There’s a happy medium, a way to enjoy technology without being constantly tethered to it. You don’t have to renounce your old life and start living like a hermit in the woods, either. However, there are very few places nowadays where you just don’t have any phone service at all. An airplane 30,000 feet above land is one of those, but air travel comes with its own bundle of anxieties, and so it’s probably not the best place to relax and unwind. The constant availability of phone and Internet service means you’re going to have to set firm limits with yourself.

Set certain hours to be no-phone hours. If someone calls you, you can answer, but that’s it. Don’t respond to texts. Don’t check your Tinder account. Just don’t look at your phone at all. If you have trouble sleeping, tell yourself that you can’t look at your phone after 10 or 11 p.m., and stick to it, even if that means you have to place your phone on the opposite side of the room, or perhaps another part of the house.

Chances are, you keep most of your photos on your phone. If someone asks to see something, you just touch the “photos” icon and show them directly. Stop doing that so much. Get some of those disposable cameras at the drugstore and take photos with them. Then send them off to be developed. You can still upload them to the Internet if you like, but there’s something to be said for having physical proof of your fondest memories. If the physical photos really stir your soul, you can hop back online and order acrylic prints of your best moments to hang on your wall.

A couple of decades ago, the Internet transformed the way we live. But the release of the first smartphone a few years ago may have had an even more drastic effect on our lives. Smartphones should enhance your life rather than dictate it. So forget your phone every now and then, and you’ll find that absence really does make the heart grow fonder.

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